THE GOAL IS NOT TO ADVANCE KNOWLEDGE, BUT TO BE IN THE KNOW
In the late 1960s, some social psychologists, known as the social constructivists, argued that the voice of ordinary people was being lost from psychological research. The concern was that individuals were wrongly being portrayed as merely perceiving their social worlds rather than actually constructing them. In order to counteract(抵消) these worrying trends, social psychologist Serge Moscovici conducted a piece of research that became a classic study of the way people absorb ideas and understand their world. In his study Psychoanalysis(精神分析): its image and its public, published in France in 1961, Moscovici explored the belief that all thought and understanding is based on the workings of “social representations”. These are the many concepts, statements, and explanations that are created in the course of everyday interactions and communications between people. They allow us to orientate ourselves in our social and material worlds and provide us with the means to communicate within a community. They are, in effect, a collective “common sense” – a shared version of reality – that is built through the mass media, science, religion, and interaction between social groups. To test his theory, Moscovici looked at how the concepts of psychoanalytic theory had been absorbed within France since World War II. He studied mass-market publications and conducted interviews, searching for evidence of the type of information that had been floating around the collective consciousness. He discovered that psychoanalytic theory had trickled down(由富者向穷者流) both in the form of “high culture” and as popular common sense: people thought about and discussed complex psychoanalytic concepts in a way that seemed quite normal, but on the whole they were using simplified versions.
Moulding common sense
The translation of difficult concepts into accessible and more easily transmissible(可传达的) language is not problematic, Moscovici contends, because “the goal is not to advance knowledge, but to be in the know”; to be an active participant in the collective circuit. The process allows the unfamiliar to become familiar, and paves the way for science to become common sense. In this way, social representations provide a framework for groups of people to make sense of the world. They also affect how people treat each other within societies. Whenever there is debate over a controversial social issue – such as whether it should be legal for homosexuals to adopt children – the impact and importance of social representations becomes apparent. Moscovici insists that social representations are genuine forms of knowledge in their own right, not diluted versions of higher-level information. In fact, he makes it clear that these everyday thoughts (rather than the more abstract, scientific versions) are significant, because “shared representations are there to set up and build a common ‘reality’, a common sense which becomes ‘normal’”.
MORE TO KNOW…
IN CONTEXT
APPROACH
Social constructivism(社会建构理论)
BEFORE
1807 German philosopher Georg Hegel says that our ideas and values are fashioned by the zeitgeist(时代精神), or spirit of the age, which constantly changes through the reconciliation of opposing views.
1927 German physicist Werner Heisenberg’s “Uncertainty Principle” reveals that the observer affects the observed.
1973 American psychologist Kenneth Gergen writes Social Psychology as History, which marks the emergence of social constructivism.
AFTER
1978 In his zone of proximal(最近的) development theory, Lev Vygotsky puts forward the idea that learning is fundamentally a socially mediated activity.
SERGE MOSCOVICI
Born Srul Hersh Moskovitch to a Jewish family in Braila, Romania, Serge Moscovici attended school in Bucharest, but was expelled due to anti-Semitic laws. After surviving the violent pogrom(大屠杀) of 1941, in which hundreds of Jewish people were tortured and murdered, he and his father moved constantly around the country. He learned French during World War II, and co-founded an art journal, Da, which was banned due to censorship(审查制度) laws. In 1947, he left Romania and travelled via “displaced persons” camps until he reached France a year later. In 1949, he gained a degree in psychology, then a PhD under the supervision of Daniel Lagache, with the support of a refugee grant. He co-founded the European Laboratory of Social Psychology in 1965, and as a professor of psychology has taught in prestigious universities across the USA and Europe.
Key works
1961 Psychoanalysis
1976 Social Influence and Social Change
1981 The Age of the Crowd